#but i made myself some white rice yesterday on the stove which i have never done and i was soo happy

[bookersebastien]

guys i had some awful white rice on campus yesterday and i just want to say to all the brits (and other flavor white people because lets be real) on here, please even just a little salt makes the difference

sincerely your rice and black bean starved latina

[whole30problems]

Reintroduction Update 4: Grains

Yep, still doing this! This morning I weighed myself again because I was pretty sure I’ve been gaining all the weight back. (If you’ll recall, I started out at 138 lbs and at last weigh-in was 127 which is CRAZY.)

Um, it said 116. I told Erik and he said sometimes the scale we have is unreliable. I tried again and it still said 116. Erik said that there’s no way I could lose 20% of my body weight unless I had a daily 1500 calorie deficit, which is impossible because I never exercise. So either the scale’s broken, his math is wrong, or I’m actually already dead. Who can say.

Anyway, I ate some grains today!

I made this crazy thing for breakfast this morning:

It’s kinda hard to see, but it’s a quinoa breakfast skillet - lots of veggies mixed with quinoa and topped with an egg and some bacon. Oh please ignore my filthy stove, by the way. Sorry. This dish entailed chopping up every vegetable on the planet and then cooking quinoa for a confusingly long amount of time, so I ended up spending like an hour making it this morning. I also had to do the dishes, and we ran out of paper towels, and it was a whole ordeal. Erik tried to give me the “hey, maybe be reasonable with this whole cooking thing, maybe you don’t need to wake up at 6 to cook a complicated breakfast before you go work a 12 hour day at your demanding early stage startup job?” and I of course responded by yelling at him and telling him that we can’t go back to eating unhealthy and then we had to have a long talk about how to make this whole thing sustainable blah blah.

To summarize, continuing to eat healthy is proving much harder than the original diet did. I just don’t know what to do with myself now. It’s really unappealing to go back to eating anything that’s not Whole 30 compliant because I’ve seen such positive results. But it really doesn’t feel like this lifestyle is sustainable for us. I literally have zero free time for anything but working and cooking. And Erik is very tired of having to hear about how tired I am of dealing with all this stuff.

Anyway, the skillet was good! I guess I like quinoa. And sweet potatoes. And bacon oh god did I miss bacon. Bacon is very good.

For lunch today, I had leftovers from dinner last night, which was this other crazy thing:

It’s chicken marbella (whatever that is) over sauteed kale. It has shallots and capers and olives and dates (!) and it’s topped with parsley. It was good, although I could have lived without the dates. I just still don’t really like sweet stuff mixed in with my meats. But it was very flavorful. And today for lunch I had the leftovers with corn instead of kale. #grainlife

I’ve had a weird recurring headache all this week. It’s possible that it’s stress, but it does seem suspicious that this has crept up on me the very week I’ve started eating things outside of the Whole 30. My skin is also not at its finest (which also could be stress I suppose) - I’m breaking out like right above my eyebrows which seems like a weird place to break out and not one that usually afflicts me. Just very hard to keep up with what’s diet related and what isn’t. For some reason I just thought it would be very straightforward to track cause and effect with this reintroduction stuff, but I still have no idea really what agrees with me and what doesn’t.

For dinner tonight, we had this slow cooker lemon chicken which Erik described as “...very fragrant” and I described as “what’s the point?”

We’ve been going to every grocery store on the planet this week trying to find a mysterious spice called Garam Masala which the recipe called for, and Erik finally tracked it down today. Turns out it’s a mix that includes things like cinnamon and cardamom, which are flavors that I very much do not like in my chicken (see above re: sweets and meats). This was definitely edible, but I don’t think we’d bother making it again. Way too much work for something that I think would taste way better if it was just straight up lemon and chicken.

But on the plus side, I got to eat rice! Man, this felt like such a ridiculous treat. I even chose brown rice over white rice, which I never thought I would say in my entire life. But even brown rice, seriously, felt decadent. 

Speaking of weird things I’ve been eating, check out this breakfast I had yesterday:

It’s spaghetti squash with hardboiled eggs and ghee and salt and pepper and a little rosemary. I came across it a couple weeks ago when I was on my quest to eat nothing but spaghetti squash ever again. I... am not sure why I thought spaghetti squash for breakfast would make any sense. This was weird. The flavors didn’t go great together (one issue is I really don’t like ghee for flavoring, it’s way too sweet and weird) and it felt like I was eating spaghetti for breakfast. Not into it.

ANYWAY. Still going. Still skinny. Still spending many hours per day cooking. Bye!